The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
one or both parents stopped attending church, and more often than not it
was the mother who stopped going, being compelled to use Sunday mornings
to prepare Sunday lunch. Other forms of religious observance were
sustained: both children and adults observed the no-games, no-work rules,
Sunday best was worn by children and fathers, family walks were taken in
the afternoon or (in summer) in the evening, and there was special food
for Sunday meals. Prayers and grace were often said in the home. Some
then returned to Sunday worship when the children had left home, notably
women who joined Mother’s Groups or similar organisations. 131 Critically,
what kept young married working-class women from church was the need
to prepare Sunday lunch and look after babies.
Christian signification is strong in personal testimony relating to the
period before 1950. In oral sources the evangelical narrative structure and
discourses on gendered piety were widely used in conceiving individuals’
lives. Dissonance between interviewees and interviewers, and between interviewees’
present and past, intimated substantive change to discourse on
Christianity. Popular autobiography, a genre which by the 1970s and 1980s
was dominated by women writing for a predominantly female readership,
focused on lost ‘community’ (both urban and rural) and lost values in which
religiosity was a prominent motif. The world that was lost was a female
one. This is nowhere more apparent, in both types of source, than with
Sundays – a woman’s day which retained much of its Protestant strictness
in many parts of Britain until the 1940s. 132 Celia Davies recalled:
We accepted Sunday and all that went with it, just as we accepted
the seasons of the year. ... I believe we even had Sunday hair ribbons.
Nearly all our toys were put away, except books of bible stories –
anything in the nature of a game was forbidden. When we went out
for a walk we were not allowed to run or skip, or trail our feet in
the autumn leaves. We walked sedately on either side of the pram,
with that ‘Sunday’ feeling inside us. 133
The Sunday ‘feeling’ was the great female sensibility. In Norfolk the Sunday
routine of church, chapel and Sunday school was undimmed in the 1930s
from the Victorian period, with the strictest houses eating only cold meals
(thus allowing women to all services), and the Sunday school festival being
the major calendar event of the summer. 134 If conversionism and anxiety
had diminished, the discursive symbolism of evangelical religion had not.
Far from being privatised or dimmed, Christianity lay at the heart of the
contented and woman-centred family life into which British society had
by the eve of World War II funnelled Victorian moral values.
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